ARM > Introduction to ARM > Architecture 7

by David Thomas on —

Architecture 7

  • v7A, v7R
    • Dynamic Compiler Support.
    • Execution Environment (Thumb-2EE).
    • VFP v3 (Vector Floating Point).
    • NEON advanced SIMD.
    • Thumb-2 mandated.
  • v7M
    • Minimalist variant for embedded uses.
    • Thumb-2 only.

Remarks

Only the newest tools currently target v7. e.g. CodeSourcery’s GCC ARM toolchain.

NEON technology is a 64/128-bit hybrid SIMD architecture developed by ARM to accelerate the performance of multimedia and signal processing applications […].

The NEON architecture provides at least 3x the performance of ARMv5 and 2x the performance of ARMv6 SIMD on a range of media and DSP applications.